Welcome back. It’s Restaurant Rockstars podcast. Thanks for being with me. It’s amazing that we’ve done so many episodes and we really appreciate you listening. Now, every restaurant needs a great restaurant menu. It’s your most important marketing tool. It’s something every guest sees, and there’s such a strategy behind great menu design.

So my guest today, Mr. Kyle Ewing, he’s a menu expert. We’re going to talk about that. The ins and outs of that strategy, the size, should it be a flat menu? Should it be trifold? Should it be big? Should it be small? Should it have certain colors and design and boxing things in that really highlights your signature items, your most profitable items?

There’s so much to it. And Kyle is the guy. So whether you need a brand new menu in a first time restaurant, or maybe your menu needs freshening up, not going to want to miss this. So stay tuned.

As long as we’re talking menu, it’s also about profit. The Restaurant Academy has a template that will maximize your restaurant profit. It first starts by teaching you how to cost out your menu. Once you’ve done that, plug in information from your point of sale system, and you will see how much money you could be losing every day because so many restaurants, their lower profit items are their biggest sellers taking sales away from what they could be selling.

Now they might be filling their seats, wondering why is my bank account not growing? It’s because your menu just isn’t profitable. So this menu is the most important thing we can talk about right now. It’s how you battle inflation. Rising costs and volatility. Check it out at restaurantrockstars.com. Now on with the episode.

You’re tuned in to the Restaurant Rockstars Podcast. Powerful ideas to rock your restaurant. Here’s your host, Roger Beaudoin.

Kyle, welcome to the show today. How are you?

Thanks so much for having me, Roger. Excited to be here.

Menus are the most important marketing tool of any restaurant. And we’re going to dive deep into strategy and planning.

What makes a really effective restaurant menu and your expertise in that over so many years. You’ve got a fantastic story tell us your story, how you got into menus

I graduated with an MBA and immediately took a job as a management consultant, thinking that’s the epitome of jobs that are available after you finish business school and worked in that industry for a number of years, At one point decided I don’t want to be on the road every single week of the year and decided to take a different job in a similar industry, but living in Denver.

Then that company actually rolled up all of its satellite offices to Chicago. And my wife had had just passed the bar in Colorado at the time, and I didn’t want to move to Chicago either. I took that as a sign to go out on my own and my personal independence day is 9 9, which makes it easy to remember.

My goal was to start a business that made ID systems for athletes and ultimately it was a difficult business. Was able to build it and made a successful exit. The challenge for me there was it wasn’t a repeatable product, meaning that if you sold something or sold one of our products to a customer, they were so durable, they never needed to be replaced and you never needed to buy a new one.

So it has a very, had a very limited market in that sense. From there, I, after I sold that business, I started TerraSlate paper and the original goal was to make. Passports out of waterproof paper and I thought that this would be useful because then you could put your passport in your pocket when you’re hiking in the rainforest or kayaking in the ocean or what have you and if it got wet it wouldn’t matter.

Now the reality is the product worked really well but nobody bought it. The people that were traveling abroad for the first time didn’t know they needed the product until after it got wet. And the people that travel abroad all the time don’t get their passports wet because they understand that. So I had about 100, 000 sheets of this waterproof paper in my basement, literally floor to ceiling boxes.

And I didn’t know what to do with it. Finally, a guy called and he said, Hey, Kyle, I really like your product. I thought, wow, somebody does. But he said, I’m actually interested in the material, but I’m not. The passports. I bought them for my daughters. They’re great, but can I buy just the paper?

And I said, absolutely. From there I was having dinner with my wife at the restaurant nearby our house. And we’re friendly with the owner from going in there regularly. And he said, Hey Kyle, I have a thought for you. Can you print my menus on this paper? And I said, actually, I don’t know, let’s give it a shot.

And he said, okay here’s a thumb drive. Bring them, print them, bring them back tomorrow. And we’ll give it a shot. His name is Jeff Esty from the Wash Park Grill here in Denver, Colorado. He’s still a customer. He’s our first customer ever. And I came back a week later, said, how are the menus?

And he said, they work great. I’ve got three other restaurants. How soon can you get them in all the rest? And so that is how we got into. The restaurant business.

Wow. That’s fantastic. Fantastic. But you already had the name Terra Slate. Does that mean something?

Great question. I really like one word names that have two parts. I also really Latin and I was struggling with the name myself. I couldn’t figure it out. And so one day I posted on LinkedIn and I said, here’s a column of words and another column of words.

When you put them together in your mind, what makes sense? And the art teacher from my high school, I literally never took art, but she’s a wonderful woman. She was like Tara Slate. And I was like, Yes. This is it. Catchy. And in Terra, Latin for earth, and then slate, something durable that you could ride on and it would literally last forever.

And that really seemed to make sense.

There you go. Okay. There’s always a story. Now we all dine out from time to time, but you as a Menu company owner and founder, you probably eat out and do you see mistakes that restaurants are making with their menus? What do you see out there?

 The answer is yes, absolutely. I love going to restaurants. I love eating new foods and trying local favorites in all different places. A couple of the things that I noticed right away on menus are The first thing is it professionally designed and is it professionally printed?

It makes a big difference for the restaurant goer. Effectively, the menu is the second thing people see when they go to a restaurant. First is the ambiance. They take it in, right? Then they sit down and somebody immediately hands them a menu. And so that first impression is really important. You want that menu to be A, clean, very neatly organized, designed, and then printed on a type of stock that has that.

The right feel to match the look and the feel of your restaurant specifically. If I get into details, a couple of the things are not best practices that have changed over time are often you’ll remember an old diner menu would have the item and then it would go dot to the other edge of the page and then it would have price ending in 99 cents.

Yeah. Yeah,

I grew up with that. If that’s your market, I love it. You But, if you’re not a diner, that probably isn’t the best way to do a menu. It’s easy to write in Google Docs or Microsoft Word, but we never want to use a dollar sign, and we never want to end in 99 cents.

The best way to do it is to put several columns of items versus just one column left justified. Have maybe three columns, put your items and descriptions in there, and then put the price at the end of the description. There’s no reason to bold it. There’s no reason to end it in 99 cents and you actually don’t even need a dollar sign.

Here’s why those things are really important. Here’s what happens. We go to the restaurant. We order the chicken instead of the beef because the chicken’s cheaper. And then we write a three star review because we didn’t love the meal. But we did that to ourselves.

We ordered the chicken and what we wanted was the beef. So to avoid price shopping. Don’t put all the prices in a column, put them in line next to the description. And everybody knows that if it says 16, that means 16. 15. 99 doesn’t sell more for than 16. It actually causes you to price shop more than if you just have a whole number.

That’s fascinating. That triggers a thought. Now we talked about descriptions. This is a multi part question. Let’s talk about an important description. Long description, catchy short description, does it matter? And then second part of the equation, what about really funky names that capture your attention, that draw you to an item?

Do you see that a lot? Let’s talk about length and catchy names.

What we see that works best is when Those items you just described match the feel of the restaurant. Now, if you have a fun beach bar and you’ve got clever drink names and fun food names and the descriptions are goofy, that can work incredibly well in that environment.

However, if you’re a fine dining restaurant, it’s going to have a much more formal feel and that’s important to maintain through the menu. So you’re going to have more elegantly written descriptions. The titles are going to be relatively standard versus, like Captain Kyle’s favorite brunch is maybe a little more fun and playful.

Not in the right place. That works incredibly well, but the key is to know your audience and speak to them. And what I would say on top of that is lean into what speaks to your audience. So if you have that fun restaurant that’s on the beach, they’re like my wife and I are going to go to on vacation and we could literally eat with no shoes on.

I want beach drinks, I want like fries, burgers, American food, and I want Captain Kyle or Captain Cook’s favorite burger with bacon and avocado or whatever it is. Lean into that. And then if you’re formal, I would lean into that as well. You’re going to use words like beurre blanc instead of butter. And that’s really captures the imagination when somebody’s reading a menu is that the menu reflects the essence of the restaurant.

Yes.

And speaks to that particular guest that is your avatar for that particular restaurant. That makes perfect sense. Now, what about colors and fonts? There’s millions of choices, and I’ve always believed that a font should reflect that ambiance. And you can even have some graphic designer create a new font that sort of Adds to that feel.

Does your company have specific graphics experts that work with a complete menu engineering type thing? How often does that happen versus someone already has the graphics. They just send you a file, you print it on your paper and all that sort of thing.

About 50 percent send us a file that’s ready to print. And the other 50 percent says, Hey, I either have an old design or I just need a fresh design or I’m a brand new restaurant. In terms of fonts, people often overdo it. When we see designs that we would love to improve, the font is either too hard to read, too big, too small, too creative.

You never want to get too cute with the fonts because you have to remember that you got to speak to the lowest common denominator at your restaurant. So if your print is very difficult to read or very small, when grandma comes in, she’s going to complain that she can’t read the menu because she’s at the corner table where the light is low.

And that’s not a great experience. So just like you said, I would match the font to the look and the feel of the restaurant. I wouldn’t overdo it. One of the rules of thumb that we follow with our design team is we never have more than three fonts on a page. Now that includes your logo. So your logo it might be a font or it might be its own design, which is a font.

That’s lovely, but we don’t want to have too many fonts. What works well with fonts is when you have a font, For the title and then a font for the description. That’s a great opportunity to use two different fonts. But like I said, you want it to match the look and the feel of the restaurant and be very easy to read so that somebody is struggling with which amazing dish to order, not what does the menu say.

When a menu comes in the door and they just want it printed on your paper, but you see so many ways it can be improved.

Is there a sort of a tactful, without insulting someone saying, you know what if Have you thought about this? What if we did that? It’s a give and take, but tell us about that because it must happen all the time.

As a rule of thumb, if they know what they want, we let them order that.

For instance, if somebody comes into a steakhouse and says, I really want A1, the chef can either be frustrated by that, or they can say, yep, got it. A1 sauce. We typically do the second. Now if they’re at times. We have overcapacity of design. It’s very rare. But in the past, what we’ve done is we’ve offered folks and said, Hey, we either have a new designer, which is why we have the capacity or whatever the situation is, we’d love to do a free refresh.

If you want to use it, great. If you hate it, great. If you Either way it’s yours to keep. So we have done that in the past, but we try not to be critical when we see menus come in. The one thing we will do is if there’s a graphic that has a watermark in it, for instance, it hasn’t been paid for we will note that because it’s not technically legal for us to print it.

You’re also not allowed to use things like NFL logos without written permission. It’s incredibly hard to get that permission. So if they want to do that, we will have to send them a DocuSign. It’s not a best practice. Don’t use NFL teams logos, Coke, Sprite, 7 up, all those are great, no problem.

But you can’t say you can’t make it look like you’re the official restaurant of the Denver Broncos, for instance.

So that’s a really interesting point. Do you have some sort of a release form they have to sign? Because if you print it and they do it, you can’t be held liable for printing it if it’s their representation of that NFL logo?

Yeah, we do. And people often just don’t realize that they can’t do that. And they say, Oh my gosh, I’m so glad to know that. And then they usually change it. There’s great Broncos are orange, right? So incorporate a lot of orange. You can incorporate a photo of the stadium, for instance, if it’s a very like iconic stadium.

You could do like a silhouette of that in the background. There’s lots of ways to tie yourself to something and be copyright free. But coming from experience, we, the reason we learned this is we got sued. It cost us about 160,000 in legal fees and settlement. And what we had done was illegal. And it’s an automatic penalty.

It took two years to resolve and an enormous amount of time. What I would recommend is figure out a way to do it without ripping something off. It’s not going to be worth the brain damage. Believe me, it was miserable.

Wow. And you’re in a sports town too. So thank you so much for that great advice. I know our audience is going to heed that.

Let’s talk about strategy. Let’s say I am a new restaurant just opening my doors and. Maybe I got a logo in mind. It’s I’ve got the items that I want to feature, but that’s it. And now, okay, I need an effective menu. That’s really going to work and sell and represent my brand. Walk us through the process of you working with a new client.

That’s just starting out.

Those are actually our favorite types of new designs when it’s never been done before, we’re going to create it. What we do is we pair them with one of our graphic designers. We have a specific menu engineering team and what they’ll do is they’ll create that menu that matches the look and the feel of your restaurant by speaking with you, if you’re able to send pictures of the restaurant, even if it’s in build out format.

It’s super helpful. Is it going to be an Irish pub with a lot of dark wood on the wall? Is it that beach bar we were talking about? Is it a fine dining restaurant? Because those are going to give our designers the cues to build the right menu for you. One tip I love to tell new restaurant owners is don’t try to satisfy every customer out there.

Here’s an example. The Cheesecake Factory is probably the only restaurant that’s ever successfully been able to cater to every type of food at the same time. It’s amazing, I know. It’s really hard for a local restaurant to do that. It’s too expensive in inventory. It’s too hard for the chefs to cook.

You don’t have a kitchen big enough for that. The best restaurants and the ones with the most five star reviews are the ones that specify we are a this type of restaurant and we are really good at this one thing. They don’t try to cater to everybody, they don’t try to make a pizza restaurant with an Asian fusion that serves sushi, but can also do all of these other dishes that don’t match.

That’s a great way to get one star reviews. The best way. Is be really good at a couple of things and stick to that. Here’s a great example. We have a customer in Honolulu. He’s one of my favorite guys. I literally met it on an airplane. He doesn’t like it when I use his name. So I will respect that. But at his restaurant every day, he had a line out the door for lunch, absolutely crazy busy.

And his kitchen could never keep up. He was like, okay, look, we have this issue. Tons of customers. But we can’t turn the tables fast enough and we can’t get food fast enough to them in order to turn the table. So they were losing business. Good problem to have. Nonetheless, it’s a problem. The genius thing he did was he took the top four items on his menu and he said, that’s the whole menu.

Got rid of everything else. You get this menu and it only has four things on it. And at first you’re like, this is impossible. Who could do that? What if I don’t like any of these four things? That’s totally fine. He can’t serve everybody. Anyway, what he said is 85 percent of my customers order one of these four things.

This is what we’re known for. So we are only going to do these four things. Now his inventory costs are much lower. He turns over his inventory faster. He almost never has spoilage and he turns those tables literally two times faster than he ever possibly could because the chefs only have to make four things again and again and again.

So they can do that in a really fast, very repeatable way

that is brilliant. And it just goes back to me coaching restaurants that have these menus and you ask them, okay, what’s your most popular item? And they’ll say, yeah, this flies out of the kitchen.

My guests will kill me if I took that off the menu. But then you say, what are your most profitable items? And they don’t know. So therein lies the genius of a point of sale system, giving you a product mix or a sales report that shows you which items are Not only the most popular, but also, if you use profitability tools or cost out your menu regularly, you know what’s most profitable and you can pare that menu down and solve the problem you just talked about.

 That’s really valuable. There’s this old theory that says, when you first look at a menu goes to say to the top right corner of the menu, and then it drops to the low, we’ve all heard this. Is there any truth to that?

Or is that just fallacy?

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Here’s what I can tell you is you can control exactly where the customer looks. And then it’s not left to chance. What we do is when we’re working with a customer, we ask them, is there something that you’re known for? Or is there a very profitable item that you would like to sell more of?

And then in the design, what we’ll do is we’ll put a box around it. We’ll feature it. We’ll indicate in some way that this is special. If you’re coming to Kyle’s cafe, you’re going to put. The original or Kyle’s favorite or something so that when somebody comes into this restaurant, they’re like, man, if I’m here for one thing, I’m going to get that because if Kyle’s cafe is on the sign above the door and it has a Kyle’s favorite on it, I’m getting that item.

It also allows you to price it higher. And that is super important. You can improve The profitability of your most popular item by featuring it properly in the menu. Now, you don’t want to overdo it, but there are incredibly subtle ways to do this. And the simplest one is put a box around it, right?

If you do, if you’re designing your menu yourself and you’re not a great graphic designer, just put a box around it. Give it a title. Those things will make a huge difference. Here’s an example that I’d love to talk about that restaurants in Hawaii specifically struggle with. People from the mainland, as they call the continental United States, come to Hawaii.

And maybe they’re not fish eaters, but they’re very excited to be in Hawaii. And they’re like, okay I want to eat fish now that I’m here. And so they’ll say, great. Oh I’ve had salmon before. That’s a pretty mild fish. I’ll have the salmon. Here’s the cringeworthy part for the restaurant owner.

There hasn’t been a salmon that swam by Hawaii in a thousand years, right? So this by default cannot be fresh. It is for sure frozen and maybe it’s getting flown in from Seattle or Alaska. It could be great fish, right? But it’s very expensive to fly fish to Hawaii. The tuna on the menu, or the ono, or there’s a plethora of Hawaiian fishes that are equally mild, equally approachable to for instance, a Midwestern beef eater.

But the profitability is incredibly high because it didn’t get flown in and it is much fresher because it was literally caught yesterday or a couple of days ago. So feature that item. And you’ll learn pretty quickly if people like it. Often the way to get people to like a new fish is the preparation.

Prepare it in a way that’s attractive. They’ll love it. There’s a lot of fish that takes on the flavor of the preparation.

This is fantastic. You should be running a restaurant, not just running a menu company. Someday. Does size matter? TerraSlate has flat menus, bi fold menus, tri fold menus, and a plethora of sizes.

Let’s talk about that part of the strategy. How do we decide what size and what configuration a menu should be?

I first of all, I just love how tuned in you are to the menus. Like I never get asked this level of detail of questions and it just shows me how keyed in you are to restaurants and how much the details truly matter. So to answer the question, does size matter?

I think absolutely it does. The most, if you just want a rule of thumb, Get a legal size menu. It’s eight and a half by 14. It’s the same width as a regular sheet of paper, but it’s a little bit taller. It fits in a place setting really well and it gives you a lot of room for items. You can do a ton of design in there.

You can have a lot of white space. You can have a million items, whatever it is for your restaurant. A legal size menu works really well. front and back. Now if you have little tiny tables I’m thinking, I’m picturing like a cafe in Italy and it’s in, it’s down a weird alley, but they have incredible food and a wonderful wine menu that might need to be a smaller menu.

Because the place setting is so small, you may physically need to use a smaller menu. Now, if you have a big American restaurant, tons of space, booths, great. Let’s scale it up to 11 by 17. Let’s get crazy and go 13 by 19. There is something to be said. for what I would call a tourist restaurant that’s parked.

For instance, I’m making it up right outside the dock where cruise ships come in. Okay. Super popular people walk off the boat. They come in for a drink. They have a meal. It’s a wonderful time. That’s a great spot to have a 13 by 19 super big impactful menu. So when somebody hands it to you, you say, wow, there is a great market for that.

But now if you’re at that small cafe in Italy, That menu is not going to fit on the place setting. It’s going to be uncomfortable. Nobody knows where to put it. It ends up on the ground or people slide it between their person, the chair next to them. We don’t really want menus on the ground. So there, there are ways that you can incorporate pretty much any design to be bigger or smaller.

And the best thing to do is work with your graphic designer. Tell them, here’s the size we want to work with. If you don’t know, pick eight and a half by 14 legal size, you can’t go wrong. If you need more than that, You can have multiple pages, you can have where you turn the page, then you can also have a trifold restaurant, very popular in Italian restaurants pizza places.

We love a trifold, very classic feel for that type of a restaurant. But I would always remind folks, don’t overdo the menu. Do a great menu that allows people to order quickly. Here’s a great example. My wife, Ashley, I love her dearly. But when we go to a restaurant and somebody hands her a menu, she reads every single item on the menu, sometimes twice, before she’ll choose.

And that’s great. I love to support her in that. I’m a little bit more efficient. I was, I suppose I probably do it wrong. But if I’m in a Mexican restaurant and I’m in the mood for a burrito, I’m only going to read the burrito section. I’m not going to read every other section because like I’m also there to have a conversation and chit chat and enjoy the atmosphere, maybe have some chips and salsa.

But the size can relate to that. So use a format that fits your restaurant. Don’t overdo it. More options is not more better.

 What about in terms of efficiency and cost effectiveness? And I asked that question related to a separate beverage menu versus fitting everything on a larger, so you don’t have two menus.

Okay, here’s our food menu, and here’s our signature cocktails, and our beers, and our wines, and all that kind of stuff. What do you see there?

We see it all the ways you just listed. The most common is people will put, if we’re picking a legal menu, food on one side, drinks and wine on the back. Super common.

Now there is some experts that would say it’s better to have two menus. Here’s why. If I sit down with a table of four, the waitress takes our drink orders, takes our food orders, picks up all the menus. Now, all of a sudden, I might not order the specialty cocktail that I was thinking about at the beginning, but just got a beer because I was in a hurry.

I’m not going to order that because I can’t remember what it was, and I’m not going to ask the waitress to bring, or the waiter to bring me another menu so I can see it. Often, having a separate menu For drinks that can be left behind if people ask is helpful. And as you and I know, as soon as everybody orders that second drink, we go from the red to the black on that table almost right away.

So we want to sell that second drink. Now it can be tacky if you force it on people, But one thing a waiter or waitress can do is say, would you like me to leave the drink menu? It’s a great option. Kids menus are often better separate because you want the kid to order for themselves. Because when the kid gets the food they want, they’re happy.

And then mom and dad and everybody else can have a good time versus if the kid is grumpy. Now we’re managing the kid. We’re not enjoying our restaurant. I have a four year old. I have license to say that. So like when she gets to pick her own and she gets to hold her own menu, it gives her a sense of pride and then she’s happier about the choice instead of when dad goes, all right, Abigail, do you want the chicken tenders, the burger, or the mac and cheese?

If I rattle it off because it’s at the bottom of my menu, it gives her less opportunity to choose what she wants. And then the mac and cheese comes and she’s I didn’t want that dad, I wanted a burr. I like kids menus being separate. The one thing I would note, Some restaurants get away with, and we’ve started to see, is what I’ve named a hero item on a kid’s menu.

For instance, they’ll put chicken tenders, burger, mac and cheese, whatever it is. And then they have, and those prices are 12 or whatever’s reasonable for the restaurant there. They have a ridiculous item. They have a 30 item on the kid’s menu or a 75 dish, and it comes with three courses for the kid.

And sometimes. You’re at a business dinner and you’ve got your kid there. And you’re like, I need to keep you entertained for two hours. So I’m going to have this course. Followed by this course, followed by this. And if it’s on the menu, I’ll do it. And my kid is super happy. She loves going to business dinners and it makes it approachable.

And sometimes people will buy it. Sometimes people will laugh and say, there’s no way I’m spending 40 on a kid’s meal. But if it’s not on the menu, they can’t order it. So some restaurants have done a really good job of adding that hero, as I call it, item on the kid’s menu that kind of makes you raise your eyeballs, but it also makes the price of the rest of the items

I’m really glad you mentioned that because once again, menus are marketing equals sales equal profit, and all these are ideas that, again, capture your guests imagination and lead to impulse sales in some cases, and offer something for everyone.

With that in mind, we talked about not trying to be all things to all people, but you serve a wide variety of restaurants. You might have Sam’s Diner, you might have Family Casual Places. What about Fine Dining? Can you do really elegant solutions, larger formats? Because If you think about going to a white tablecloth place where the guys are wearing, the aprons and the white shirts and the black aprons and all that kind of stuff, you traditionally see the big menu folder.

It might even be leather bound and all that kind of stuff. Can you replace that and work with elegant restaurants with some of your solutions?

Absolutely. Here at Terra Slate, we often get clients that used to have a giant menu book with multiple pages. The challenge is those books wear out and they’re incredibly expensive.

So while we will, of course, print, we call the menu inserts that fit in those, we don’t make those books. And what we notice is a lot of restaurants today, especially if they’re fine dining, they will keep their wine menu that has a million bottles. They Totally makes sense. But the food menu usually has a lot of white space or even an ivory background, a very elegant look, elegant fonts, a lot of white, or what we would call like neutral space.

No, no design elements in there. And that allows fine dining restaurant to have a great looking menu without having to rebuy those books. every couple months or once a year. They don’t need it. It almost looks more elegant when you’re handed a professionally printed ivory color menu and it’s a single sheet.

It can be really large. That looks better than a menu book that’s worn at all the edges because we don’t really have the budget to replace them today.

Absolutely. That’s another pet peeve. You go into a restaurant and coffee stains on a menu or bent menus or, they haven’t been cleaned properly these are all impressions.

And your company and your process eliminates a lot of the hassles of stuffing in the menu holders and antimicrobial feature. How does it work and what’s the process

what’s cool about TerraSlate menus is they’re printed on waterproof, rip proof paper. The stuff is incredibly durable. We do a ton of work with the military on the exact same material. Obviously they’re not printing menus. They’re printing the manuals and the maintenance log it doesn’t get bent corners. It doesn’t crack and fray. You can literally hole punch it. Or cut it, and it’s still completely waterproof. That is the word allows you to wipe every menu clean every single time and every customer that comes in can and should have a clean menu.

There’s never going to be a water stain on it. Maybe we’re back at that Mexican restaurant and somebody spilled salsa and it was the last table the night and it dried overnight. We need that to come off right away with a super quick towel. And that’s what Terra Slate menus are designed to do.

They’re designed to make sure that you as the restaurant owner are able to hand. What looks like a brand new menu to every single customer every single time, but you don’t have to reprint it a thousand times a day. The antimicrobial aspect is something that we developed at the beginning of COVID. And here’s the secret that I’ll let you in on.

It is the exact same science that Microban uses. Microban actually approached us and said, Hey, We have this big fancy name. You should license this from us for millions of dollars per year. And we said, we don’t need to license it. We appreciate that, but we’d rather pay our employees and pass the cost savings onto our customers that we appreciate so much.

Here’s how it works. Silver, gold and silver, actual silver can be ground into a very fine powder. And then it can be included in the nano coating that we put on top of the menus. Now the nano coating is what protects the toner on the sheet. Sheet lasts forever until you recycle it.

It will last. The toner is actually the fragile part. So back when I started the business, we added this nano coating that protects the toner. Then during COVID, we ground up silver, mixed it in. You can’t see it, but. It is there and it makes the menus anti bicrobial, meaning that nothing will grow on them.

They’re super easy to wipe clean. Nothing stains it. It’s a wonderful product. And that, and while we know that every restaurant intends to wipe every menu between every customer, we know that all, that isn’t always possible, right? Not, Just, we manage a lot of people. It’s often a fast moving environment.

How nice is it that germs aren’t spreading? You’re not going to have that foodborne illness give everybody a sickness because one guy that was sick licked his finger, touched the menu, and then it just got passed around and around. That stuff won’t grow on it. Antimicrobial coatings are an incredible innovation that we brought to menus, and we do it for free.

We don’t charge anything for the coating. Don’t charge anything to make it antimicrobial. It’s all included in the product because that’s our commitment to you as the restaurant owner. I’ve worked in restaurants. I know how hard it is to keep everything clean. I know how much effort goes into that. Why not pass it along?

There’s no cost for that.

You mentioned microban and not needing that, but is there any proprietary tech that goes into your menus that you have legally protected? Because I haven’t seen the competition. There’s menu companies out there, but this is the first I’ve seen of this process or the antimicrobials.

Is there some, intellectual property that you control over that?

There is. Yeah. And I’m limited by what I can say on it. Okay. I was just curious. But what I can say is that when you buy a TerraSlate menu, you’re getting the best product that you can buy, and our goal is never to gouge the customer.

We literally haven’t raised our prices since COVID. I can’t name another business that’s done that. It’s been really important to me, and it stemmed from The time during COVID where the cost of everything was skyrocketing. Our costs were going up. Everybody’s costs were going up. And then I think some businesses actually took advantage of it, where maybe their costs didn’t go up materially, but they thought everybody else is raising their prices.

Yeah, of course. Do that too. Here at Terra Slate, I said, you know what? I’m Restaurants have never had it harder than when we were in a COVID world. And then even for a while afterward, I said, we are going to go back and we’re going to renegotiate every contract with one of our vendors. We’re going to buy in bigger volumes.

We’re going to buy more efficient equipment. We’re going to invest in all of these things that allow us to keep that price the same because the restaurants depend on us to print their menus. Their number one sales tool. Why would we gouge them? We ought to, as people and as a business, do everything we can To pass the savings on to them.

So we literally haven’t raised our prices since COVID.

Wow. That is consumer and social responsibility right there. That’s fantastic. is there a strategy for the number of menus to purchase based on the number of seats or pricing and volume? And tell us about how that works.

If you want a general rule of thumb, one menu per seat, Is a great rule of thumb. Now, you can often get away with less because not, you usually don’t sit the whole restaurant when everybody needs a menu at the exact same time. But what we hear back from our customers is when we say, Hey, you have a hundred seat restaurant, why a hundred menus?

And they’ll say, Oh, here’s why. Because while not everybody sits at the same time on a busy night or a busy day or whatever it is, Those menus will get accidentally misplaced by a server or the hostess or the host, and then they end up in a weird place and nobody finds them till the end of the night, and we can’t have a new table come in that we don’t have a menu to hand them.

And so that’s a great rule of thumb. Technically, you can get away with less. Like three quarters menus works great. We have some customers They go one and a quarter. So they’ll order 125 menus for 100 seat restaurant because it’s so busy. And because they have maybe that chips and salsa issue, they don’t have time to wipe every single menu down while they’re pumping tables in.

So they’re going to take used menus or menus that might need to be cleaned. They’re going to put them to the side. And then when they slow down a little bit, then they’re going to clean them and put them back in the hostess stand. So It depends on the needs of the restaurant. A great rule of thumb, a menu per seat if budget is important.

You can get away with less, for sure. For sure. You could probably get down to about 50 in that 100 seat restaurant. And as long as you remind your servers don’t put the menus down in the kitchen, put them back at the hostess stand, and you have a host or hostess that’s cleaning them and making sure that they’re wiped and ready for the next customer, that would work great.

Okay, so it’s really a balance, because obviously the more you purchase, the price comes down per unit. Is that correct?

It is. Yeah. What I tell people and what I have my staff tell people is there’s no reason to over order on menus. You don’t need to stockpile them. Here’s why. The minimum quantity for us is 25.

So if you have a hundred seat restaurant and you’re like, man, budgets are really tight right now, I need to save money everywhere I can. Let’s get you 50 menus, because if you need 25 more, we can top you up in any time. We have a one day turnaround time that we do free overnight shipping. So you can literally eat Need those menus?

Order them today and have them for the tables tomorrow without paying any extra cost. So there’s really no need to over order. We’re always able to get you topped up the next day if you need it.

 restaurants change their menus from time to time. So it’s really easy to say, okay, a couple of months later, hey, we’ve added a couple of menu items and the, 99 percent of the menu is there.

You just, Re ship them new ones, finding space and re designing to add the items and again quick turnaround and all that sort of thing happens.

Yeah the normal interval that we see for menu turnover, the average is once per quarter, four times a year, every three months. Usually it aligns with the seasons.

You have a summer menu, a fall menu, winter menu, spring menu very common, probably the most common way to do it. There’s a lot of restaurants if we’re moving outward, that will print every month. They have a monthly menu that works great. Some do twice a year and some do once a year. What’s nice about TerraSlate menus is they’ll last easily two and three years.

If you treat them even reasonably well, they will last. And we have some restaurants that they do what they do very well and they rarely change the price. So they use that same hundred menus for two and three years at a time. And they say, Hey Kyle, you haven’t heard from me in a while. You probably don’t remember.

But we need another order and we say, okay, great. That’s what our product is designed to do, is to make the restaurant look good. And our job is to do what works for them.

I was going to ask you that question, but you just answered it. If a restaurant doesn’t change their menu, what’s the longevity?

Wow. They’ll go two to three years. That’s remarkable. And that’s a Tribute, obviously, to the process and the product that you’re using. What about QR codes? Do you see much of that? Do you recommend it? To drive someone to a promotion or a concert this weekend or some special something, signature item that you want to sell or limited time offers.

Do you see that much? Are people using those?

During COVID, when COVID first happened, it was like March when it just hit. In April, we shipped like a couple hundred thousand QR code menus. And then by June, everybody was switching back. And we started asking them our friendly accounts Hey, everything switched to QR.

Why are we back? And they said we’re switching back because it pisses off all the customers. Nobody likes to pinch and zoom at the restaurant. They want to have that conversation with the people they’re with. And as soon as somebody pulls out their phone, the conversation stops. So they were getting bad reviews and they switched back to printed menus.

Now, what we see is some restaurants will put a QR code on the printed menu. That way, if you’re a pinch and zoom, great, good for you. You don’t have to touch a thing. Super easy. Where we see QR codes leveraged best are the things you mentioned, like promotional items or join our club, scan this link to join and be a member.

And then you accrue points towards a free meal or a drink or something like that. That’s typically the best place to use it is get them to register for your loyalty club or a promotional offer versus okay they have to scroll past the lunch menu to get to the dinner menu. And then where’s the drink menu.

And then somebody had a question. Oh, I have to scroll back. Typically not a best practice to force people to use a QR code.

Okay. Excellent advice. We talked about the free overnight shipping, which is really quick on that part. How about the very first phone call or contact to Terrislate to producing this thing, working with the client, perhaps graphically, and then delivering a draft or a proof before they actually say print it is there a typical timeline there?

Yes. We’ve recognized that while it would be nice to have six weeks to get a menu ready, nobody’s ever able to plan a menu six weeks in advance. So what we do is we do that introductory call. If you’re doing a design, we get you on the phone with one of our menu engineers, and we talk. Shop right away.

Our goal is to get them a draft in the first two days, often in 24 hours. But we try to say two days because we’re often very busy. They say, yes, I love where we’re headed with this. Or they say, you know what, I don’t like this, or I want to change that, or X, Y, and Z. And then we make those edits right away.

They say, yes, looks great. Approved. Or, you know what? I had some second thoughts. Here are some additional changes. Great. We make those. And then what we do before we print anything is we make a physical proof or a digital proof. So we can show the customer, this is exactly what it’s going to look like when you get it.

They say approved, they can do it on their phone or their email. on the computer, whatever is easy. And then the order goes into production. We ship 95 percent of orders the same day. Ask me, what about the last 5%? Great question. It’s just because that order came in too late in the day to actually get it produced and on the FedEx or UPS truck before they leave.

So once the proof is approved, the order goes immediately into production, typically within 15 minutes. And that order, while it takes a couple of hours per order, we get started right away. It. 95 percent of the time ships same day, and then you’ll have it the next day or the next business day, because we include free overnight shipping with every order.

Excellent. Now, the vast majority of restaurants, I know we talked about the fine dining piece and you can handle those solutions too, but we’re talking family, casual, fun places, Kyle’s Beach Bar, whatever it is. You also do table tents, right? We were huge in our restaurants with those. They really move product.

You can focus on signature items and drive attention to those. You do a bunch of those as well, right?

We do, yeah, and they used to just be triangles, very basic. And we had customers some of our larger customers saying I want to make it a design. So like when it’s popped up, I want it to look like a basketball hoop for March Madness.

And like people could literally like ball up the little, Paper from a straw and shoot it in there and other people were like, okay, we want to do this and we want to have it stand out. We didn’t have a way to do that. We could only cut straight lines. So we found this piece of equipment and we literally had it flown in from Switzerland.

It, it costs more than my first house. It’s incredible because it’ll cut any. Any shape, it’s called a die cutting machine. And it allows us to build a custom cut for anything we want. We can make the coolest stuff. Sometimes like the table tent is like a little like package with a an extra pop up on the top and a way to slide something in the back.

And like people get so creative and our designers are just like, I love looking at that stuff they build because it is so cool. And my brain doesn’t work that way. So when I see it, I’m like, wow, that’s awesome. How did you make this?

That’s cool. Kyle, you’re a wealth of information of all things restaurant, not just menus, and you’ve given us tremendous advice and even strategies on how to improve our restaurants and how our guests perceive our restaurants.

But again, the majority of people, everyone’s going to see your menu, and it is your most important marketing tool. Beyond the ambience. So Kyle, thanks so much for being with us on the Restaurant Rockstars podcast.

Thanks for having me.

That was terraslate.com. So check them out if you’re in the mood for a brand new menu design, or if you’re starting your very first restaurant and you need a menu.

Thanks so much for tuning in. That was the Restaurant Rockstars podcast. Can’t wait to see y’all in the next episode. So stay tuned and stay well.

Your restaurant menu is your most important and effective marketing tool. Check out Terra Slate. Terra Slate offers waterproof, rip proof, antimicrobial menus that are easy to clean and last. Terra Slate leads the industry shipping menus to every state and over a hundred countries with a super fast one day turnaround and free overnight shipping.

Try Terra Slate. Your team will love them. Go to terraslate. com. That’s T E R R A S L A T E dot com.

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